Diversion: Eighth Collection of Poems from Leland Kinsey, GALVANIZED

Poetry month will arrive in a few more days, and with it, on April 8, the publication of the eighth collection of poems from Vermont writer Leland Kinsey. Nearly 400 pages thick, the volume is a treasure of rural life -- of place, and of family, as well as the traditional trades of farming and "going to the woods" for trees, lumber, solitude, and consolation. GALVANIZED speaks to the energy and nearly alchemical process of refining experience into story, and story into poem, as Lee continues to do.

The collection is a "New and Selected Poems," fronted with a baker's dozen of poems that haven't seen the press before. They are not all "just hatched" ... but maybe they have lain on the desk long enough to detach their sharp edges from this poet's heart, so that he can allow us to enter his grief for his sister Helen, for instance, in "Transit of Venus." These newly revealed tales-in-lines are also a bit looser in form and sound, a bit more clearly the stories themselves that press toward the light. Kinsey's kneading, pressing, and forming of the narratives engage us in the sharp turning points, the sudden awareness of a son who echoes one's own childhood, a longing for long-passed times and family members, a connection between what was then and what stands strongly now: as "Work and Song" announces, "substrate, intrusions, and bedrock / redolant with song."

Of equal and lasting delight are Kinsey's selections from his seven earlier books, and I felt as though I were milling in a crowd of old friends, marveling at how their early appearances had lingered in their lined faces full of character and choice. From the Barton, Vermont, poet's first book, Northern Almanac, I found the memorable and still shocking (in the sense that a young man is shocked by his first exposure to the grit and glory of sexuality) long poem "Fair Days." From Not One Man's Work is the poem "Galvanized," with an ending that satisfies me all over again, describing the "niter," the unpalatable residue from boiling maple sap for a season:

When young we tried it ourselves
dared each other to like it.
It had the sour and bitter taste
of the metals that make the world,
and, if attention was paid,
left for a second on the tongue
a thin sweet coating.

Here is also one of my favorites, "Fireflies," one of the many poems drenched heart-deep with Kinsey's emotions and connections to his father and his upbringing. (This is unquestionably a man's world for this poet, in a good sense, the way that Maxine Kumin's poems were and are always a woman's.) "My father's face glistens / in the milk house doorway / the first hot night in June."

I paged eagerly into the section from In the Rain Shadow, poems that follow this quintessential rural Vermont poet on a once-in-a-lifetime visit to a cousin working in Tanzania, where people call out "Kinsey!" and don't expect Leland to reply! I love the ties of one working landscape to another, half a world away, as with "In the Rain Shadow of Mount Meru," where the first stanza opens with "Young camels' groaning calls / carry to their mothers" and then nips toward "The least of the camels produce more milk / than an average cross-bred cow." Each new experience is lapped over the earlier ones, building a fresh sense of both the distant location and the meaning of home.

Three-quarters through, the collection crescendoes into poems from The Immigrant's Contract, a book I share with people who find poetry confusing in general -- but who may find themselves deeply connected to Kinsey's portrait of the landscape of the Nullhegan River's surroundings, where "the immigrant" logger proclaims: "Took years to cut this region over once. / This river drove us both ways, / into and out of life, and, shining dark-like, / just kept coming." And at last there are poems from the sweet and intense exploration of the wildlands remaining among us, Winter Ready, which Kinsey gave to us in 2014, spilling out "bottle gentian, asters, nettles" as well as "Moose paths, vole and lemming runs" -- the varied and specific abundance of the places best explored alone, a little bit lost, aching with both grief and beauty.

GALVANIZED captures why we live in the vulnerable places of the world, tasting and savoring and exploring. It captures the root word "love" in "loveliness," without speaking those names, but instead showing us through story, memory, and vivid complexity. Let this book simmer and thus perfume the days and evenings ahead. With Leland Kinsey, Green Writers Press of Brattleboro, Vermont, has brought us this fine and treasured gift.

Vermont Fiction With Life's Painful Mystery, HIDDEN VIEW, Brett Ann Stanciu

When I read The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo and then its two sequels, there were plenty of times when I said "No way, this couldn't happen" -- but they didn't add up to much, compared to the amount of truth in Stieg Larsson's dark Swedish trilogy. The first book's original title on publication in Sweden was "Men Who Hate Women" and this noted crime series paid attention to the inevitable results of such brutality: shattered families, increased darkness and evil, and a young woman adept in opening up puzzles as if they were infected wounds, and coolly and professionally removing the diseased portions of the body.

Now Brett Ann Stanciu, in a debut novel published by tiny Green Writers Press of West Brattleboro, Vermont, has shown that an American woman can meet the same high bar, in painting the reality and the consequences of domestic violence.

Young, sheltered, and completely convinced by an older man's wooing, Fern has married in haste and taken on the enormous task of being the wife of a hard-luck farmer with big dreams, on an isolated Vermont hill farm. HIDDEN VIEW is also the name of the farm itself. Stony soil, trees whose hearts have rotted, a barn crumpling and a house that hasn't been maintained -- for Fern, these are hidden aspects that she can ignore. She defines her world in terms of her own possession of it: "my husband Hal," and "dear darling baby girl" Tansy, and her view of herself:

a young mother and woman, in love with her husband, a farm spread out around us with a thousand different potentials.

He bent toward me and kissed my lips, his mouth laced with coffee. "Ah," he whispered. Then he drew back and with his free hand waved grandiosely.  ... In the warm weather, the fields sprouted green corn and alfalfa. A bat swooped over the garden's center, a dark darting blur, feeding, and then vanished. Tree frogs chorused, alive. I found myself nodding, yes, yes,  my daughter's minute hand tugging at my shirt collar.

Perhaps that yes was simply the song that carried me along through those early days of our marriage. All around me I saw nothing but possibility, never a hand held up to say stop, stop.

Stanciu shows, through Fern's eager eyes, the verdant beauty and potential of the hill farm. Beyond her thriving vegetable gardens and her brave kitchen efforts and her committed and marvelous mothering of Tansy as baby and toddler, though, a dark shadow is spreading. At first she defines it in terms of Hal's drinking -- the bourbon poured with abundance into a jam jar and consumed in a way that fuels his angers and his insistence. To Hal that garden doesn't count, the child's a distraction costing work hours, and the cows in the barn stink and remind Hal of his father; only making maple syrup matters, the amassing of Vermont "liquid gold" for the rising market. And the accidents that go with the process, whether his burned foot or the scorched sugaring pans that Fern doggedly scrubs and labors to save, are nothing compared to the flame of Hal's own obsession with remaking the farm in his own image.

Early in the novel, we're blindingly aware, in a way that Fern can't afford to be, that Hal is a menace, someone putting Fern's life at risk and demanding that she give up hope of being happy -- including the nurturing of their daughter. Fern's stubborn resistance protects Tansy, for the most part, although the little girl's imaginary rabbit friends begin to utter loud protests. How much will it take before Fern admits the situation can't be saved? Isolated, friendless, cut off by her own distant mother, she's not seeing any way off the farm. And like spring itself, pressing the maple sugaring season into frantic action, then washing the days away into the melt and greening of the world, Fern clings to the possibility of her original dream of marriage and home.

Just as it seems it all must tumble down, and Fern must finally admit it's time to go -- somehow, anywhere -- the careful balance of forces turns untenable, with the arrival at the farm of Hal's long-vanished brother Lucien, who has some amount of hold on the farm itself, and a tenderness with baby Tansy that completely undoes Fern's defenses. Yet she can't quite let go:

I believed Hal and I would come back to each other, this rift between us a rainy season that would, eventually, disperse and clear. I believed we would grow old together. ... I believed to get there, I had to endure through here. All things in due course. Hands to the shovel. Lean into your work. Persevere.

Early in the book, I was swept by a certainty of truths in HIDDEN VIEW: that Stanciu knew the bizarre and fragile construction that people's self-deceptions can frame. And that she was telling, out in public, against all the rules, the heartbreaking story of far too many women I've known, at one time or another, who struggled to make their dreams come to reality in situations where any detached observer would have said instead, "Leave! Get out while you can!"

This isn't crime fiction in the classic sense, but the mystery of Lucien's life and disappearances turns out to circle Fern's struggle. And the questions of loyalty to person, commitment to dreams, and betrayal of the helpless are as vivid as the flames in the sugarhouse, as sweet and dangerous as the hot boiling maple sap on its way to becoming valuable syrup.

There's so much truth in this book that at some point, it stops being "fiction" and stands instead as a portrait, layered, complex, and wise. The Vermont that we love, the farms that we treasure, the children we nurture are fully present.

And so is the darkness, and despair. What is the value of a view that's hidden, even from the viewer? Fern, Hal, Lucien, Tansy: their lives depend on the answer.

Vermont Diversion: Everyone's Mortal in WHAT'S THE STORY, Sydney Lea

Vermont sprouts poets even in the winter -- there is no closed season for their interactions with the landscape. But Sydney Lea, with a Pulitzer finalist among his list of collected poetry and essays, turns instead to interaction with neighbors and community, and WHAT'S THE STORY, his release this month via Green Writers Press, elevates the poetic reflection to astounding levels of love and awareness.

It's a risky direction: Sometimes the friends and relatives of writers aren't wild about being brought onto public pages. Lea dodges a bit of that risk by writing mostly here about people who've already died. This choice allows him to reflect and grieve, as he confronts his own aging -- not just a waning physical ability to climb mountains and loosen boulders, but the near-daily loss of friends and neighbors his age and older. Reflecting on the passing of a chair-building craftsman, Irv, dead at 82 while tilling the vegetable garden, Lea writes, "Irv's gone, and the earth keeps healing, not to be healed for now, maybe never. Probably never."

But he presses beyond the wound of loss to say, "How fine, that almost shy way the man would greet anyone he cared for, his smile barely perceptible, his ice-blue eyes cast down, his words hard to discern at first. Not that Irv was cold, only modest. He was what he was, irreplaceable among other things."

In WHAT'S THE STORY, Lea grapples to portray why each friend matters so much; he does it with precise yet rich descriptions of people and even of hunting dogs, as well as shared terrain. And that terrain is not just the ridges of Vermont and neighboring New Hampshire; it's also the passionate country of jazz, so that these "reflections on a life grown long" involve Charlie Mingus, Muddy Waters, and more. When he writes in memory of Jack Myers, a poet friend, by first replaying his own college experience of Mingus's music, he then tastes the state of "Jack's not with us" like this:

His absence may account for the sound, which has nothing, really, to do with the intricate magic of that Mingus sextet I listened to, nor with any line or stanza from Jack's mournful, witty, brilliant poems, nor is it the cry of sea birds. If Wagner didn't drive me almost mad, or maybe because he does, I'd say that the chord was a dark Wagnerian one. It washes over me the way the surf does a rocky shore.

After nearly seventy of these short reflections -- most just two or three pages long, and each one threaded so precisely that it's half memoir, half prose poem, and three-quarters jazz improv in words -- I wanted to shout at the author: Stop worrying! We are all getting older! Enjoying your grandchildren, your remembered childhood, picking a cemetery plot -- what's so terrible about all that?

But that's exactly the point in what Syd Lea's done with these short, bladed, budding items: taken the terror of aging and proved its tender beauty. So I return to the first page, in the reflection titled "Whatever I May Say," and re-read: "Though to touch its flame would surely be as painful as when it burned brighter, the candle's low now. On the table, just prior to guttering after dinner, it vaguely illuminates friends."

Read this one to savor the way friends matter, and love abides. Thanks, Syd, and Green Writers Pres.

Diversion: Vermont Fiction, from Green Writers Press

Sometimes we really do read books that aren't mysteries ... and we were very excited this year to note the growth of Vermont's Green Writers Press and the arrival of its well-received anthology CONTEMPORARY VERMONT FICTION. Many thanks to press and anthology editor Robin MacArthur for taking part in an interview about the book!

1. It's great to see your newly published collection, *Contemporary Vermont
Fiction.  *Was there a special "Aha!" moment that triggered your desire to
pull this book together?

This idea of this book had been brewing in me for many years. I began obsessively reading and writing Vermont-based fiction when I was eighteen--when I left home for college--and I haven't quit since. I think stories are an amazing way to know a place in a deeper and more complex way. As for actually publishing it; Dede and I met up last summer and within 10 minutes had decided to make this dream happen. Green Writers Press and Contemporary Vermont Fiction are a match made in heaven!

2. I see you have a number of high-profile authors here, like Howard Frank
Mosher, Annie Proulx, and Wallace Stegner -- are there any debut authors
included, or authors you think should be better known?

Miciah Bay Gault is an amazing writer and the editor of the wonderful literary journal Hunger Mountain. She doesn't have a book out yet, but her stories have been published in great places, and I have no doubt her book will find a home soon. And there are quite a few authors in the book whose work I have admired for many years, but who may not be as well known: Ellen Lesser, Laurie Alberts, Peter Gould, Suzanne Kingsbury, Bill Schubart.  In a state like Vermont you don't have to look very far to find an amazing writer whose voice deserves to be heard. 

3. What characters in *Contemporary Vermont Fiction* might appeal

especially to readers of mystery and suspense? And are there any
suspenseful stories in here?

There aren't any stories that I would specifically call mystery, but Joseph Bruchac's story is full of suspense and intrigue. It has me perched on the edge of my chair every time. 

4. How about in the publication process -- any suspenseful moments as you
brought this collection together?

Oh, plenty of them! There were so many last minute changes by authors and ourselves that we wondered whether this book would ever make it to press. But we made it, and the collection, as is, feels just right.

5. Green Writers Press has a special mission -- how does this title fit
into the mission?

I'm a big believer in the role that art can and should and needs to play in the environmental movement. Green Writers Press's mission is to "make the world a better place" and I believe that if we know places better, and have a more empathetic understanding of our neighbors' lives, we will be both more compassionate residents of our communities and more reverent caretakers of our land (and rivers, and resources etc.). So call me a dreamer, but I believe that more books about places will, yes, make the world a better place. 

6. What's ahead for you? Will there be a volume 2 collection, or do you
have some other projects you'd like to tell us about?

Who knows, there may be a volume 2 someday! For now I'm going to sit down and work on my own collection of stories set in Vermont, and enjoy spending time with my two young children. How to juggle the creative and the parenting life is the big mystery in my life...one that never fails to surprise and delight.

Thanks, Robin! This anthology is already a classic, and a treat for any bookshelf that especially features Vermont ... and any literary collection, too.

Diversion: Leland Kinsey, WINTER READY (Vermont Poet)

Every now and then, I review some poetry -- and as we race toward April, which is National Poetry Month, I'm reading and thinking about poems in between crime novels. (I'll write about those this evening, too, but separately.)

You know about the "localvore" movement in food, yes? Green Writers Press in Brattleboro, Vermont, is applying the same ideas to books: gathering regional authors, "giving voice to writers who will make the world a better place," and designing, printing, and marketing their books "at home" -- in Vermont. Dede Cummings, designer and publisher, sent me an advance copy of her newest offering, being released on March 20, and it's a gem: WINTER READY, a 96-page book of poems from Vermont poet Leland Kinsey.

I grew into my Vermont boots just up the road from Lee, and his retired-teacher mom hosted a playgroup where my children learned to love Rice Krispie bars, and to take turns with other kids. But I didn't really know Lee, other than to say hello, and even though we cross paths in the poetry world, I still don't know him well -- he's a private person, and I'm not one to push.

Which makes it especially pleasing that in WINTER READY, Leland Kinsey opens both the natural world and an interior landscape of exploring, testing, and sometimes grieving. He presents forms that have the wind-urged "give" of barn walls: lined up straight along the beams, but slowly swaying a bit, and with spaces where a board's been pulled for a view, now that the cows don't need care. Swallows fly past your face; owls speak; oldtimers give half a story, expecting you to work out the rest.

There are rhythms in here, the quiet rhythms of spoken speech, of narrative -- the lines break the light into emphasis on small details, but there's nothing forced. I found in here a sense of empty nesting: of examining who we are once the kids are grown and gone, once the barn is empty, once the older relatives who needed us have slipped away. I clipped the obituary from the local paper when Lee's father passed on, last year, but that's not at the heart of this book -- in spite of a clever poem at the end that salutes him. Instead, there are gardens -- the ones at the end of a harvest season -- and trees that outlive their time, and woods that overtake open spaces, teasing you into thinking you've remembered the wrong place, when actually the foundation or cabin is in front of you, just overgrown.

"Double Digging the Garden" catches a lot of this, contemplating the process of putting the garden to bed by digging in nutrients and turning the soil, where so much has grown:

My wife and I now have way too much
of all of this. Our children are gone.
Pets, large and small, which used to consume the extra
have long since died.

But the work remains, and the seasons pull the work into place again, again. The poet comments at the end,

Each summer I bring friends out
to note and share the display and produce.
Here is life's habit on grand exhibit
and the hard work hidden.

Many of the poems name birds or plants in exquisite detail, and I felt the urge to read the lines aloud to a group of grade-school kids who might not know the species but would hang on the sounds of the species. "Naming without revealing," I jotted down for myself, thinking about the way Lee allows the creatures to pass by, whether on the page or in the cranberry bog.

Some phrases caught my inner ear and lodged there, ringing: "ended his lovely trouble," "when I glass them," "I damp soil for" -- and as I grew into the phrasing, I found some marvelous endings, to "Horseshoeing" ("But any path to or through / the past is an icy road, / whatever the pace, / distorted by speed") and to "Quebec City Boardwalk" ("the unmeasured plainchant / of these ordinary wonders / plays on").

The poem I know I'll be most looking forward to re-reading each time I pick up this collection again will be "Deer Camp," a war poem of sorts that begins, "The drive in is long / over bad logging roads gone worse." I hope to read this one aloud to a friend soon -- and I shall let my "older self" keep reading it, for the layers hidden in a long story of family and change.

Leland Kinsey's WINTER READY is available on March 20 directly from Green Writers Press (click here), but also ready for preorder online at the big online distributor, if that's how you roll. If you give yourself a copy, you'll be better fitted to make the most of April.